1. Technical Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to communication systems including at least some optical communication links therein; and, more particularly, it relates to operating and processing as performed in accordance with electrical to optical conversion of signals within such communication systems.
2. Description of Related Art
Data communication systems have been under continual development for many years. There are a wide variety of types of communication systems implemented using various types of communication media (e.g., wired communication systems, wireless communication systems, optical communication systems, and various combinations thereof that include components and links of various types therein [such as a communication system including wired, wireless, and/or optical communication links]).
Certain communication systems employ one or more of various types of coding (e.g., error correction codes (ECCs) whose decoding may be performed iteratively) to ensure that the data extracted from a signal received at one location of a communication channel is the same information that was originally transmitted from another location of the communication channel. Communications systems with iterative codes are often able to achieve lower bit error rates (BER) than alternative codes for a given signal to noise ratio (SNR).
In addition, various types of communication systems may employ one or more of various types of signaling (e.g., orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), code division multiple access (CDMA), synchronous code division multiple access (S-CDMA), time division multiple access (TDMA), etc.) to allow more than one user access to the communication system. Such signaling schemes may generally be referred to as multiple access signaling schemes.
In some communication systems that include both electrical and optical components and com links therein, there seems to be an ever-increasing movement to increase the amount of optical related infrastructure therein. For example, for over a decade, there has been an ongoing movement to implement “fiber to the house” such that a communication links all the way to an end user (e.g., a cable modem subscriber in a residential home) are implemented using optical means (e.g., fiber-optic communication links). As is known, optical communications often provide certain advantages and benefits over electrical based communications (e.g., greater bandwidth, greater throughput, dielectric nature of the communication media, etc.). However, even within such communication systems that do include optical components and communication links therein, there are both electrical to optical and optical to electrical conversion of signals therein within various components.
Within multiple access communication systems in which more than one communication device communicates via a common optical communication link serviced by one or more optical transmitters (that effectuates the electrical to optical signal conversion therein), including cases where the combining is passive combining, and with or without amplification, there is a need to manage and control the multiple access to such an optical transmitter, and specifically, there is a need to manage and control the turning on and off of such an optical transmitter, in part to reduce the instances of optical beat interference (OBI) and increase in noise and distortion which may result if a plurality of optical transmitters are active simultaneously. The means existent in the prior art are simply inadequate to deal with the many issues inherent to such communication systems.